A night in the life of a Porter

As of this week, there will no longer be a friendly porter manning the lodges in Vanbrugh and Derwent overnight. The University has scrapped the services in these bases, instead using one porter in Langwith to look after all three colleges.

Heslington Hall top dogs reckon that it “makes sense” to merge the service of the three smaller colleges.

With this in mind,  I  spent the evening with one Derwent porter on his night shift, to find out exactly what we will be missing now that the service has been axed.

The shift starts at 8pm. The porters lodge is still really busy, with plenty of students coming and going. Terry* is clearly popular and well known to many of them, they call his name and give him the thumbs up as they head out to town.

There are quite a few lost freshers too, who approach the desk nervously to ask for directions to a room in Derwent where it seems a society is holding their welcome meeting.

“I think it’s so important that there is someone here,” says Terry. “You get all  kinds of problems when there’s not.”

He explains that before Freshers’ Week kicked off properly there was not a porter in the college every night. One morning Terry arrived at the lodge to find a Chinese student surounded by piles of luggage, waiting to be let into her room. She had been on her own not knowing what to do for 6 hours.

“This poor little student, did not one person see her? It’s outrageous,” says Terry. “Security are meant to be keeping an eye on the college when there is no porter there, but clearly this is not happening. They just said that she should have used the red phone to call for help but for her it was a culture shock, she needed someone here to be a friendly face, someone who could tell her what to do.”

On a typical night, especially at the beginning of the academic year, Terry reckons he lets in about 5 or 6 students who have locked themselves out or lost their keys.

He is called out frequently to deal with noise complaints about students playing their music too loud or smokers getting too noisy outside bedroom windows.

Smokers are also often guilty of wedging block doors open so that they can come and go easily, but then forget to close up when they go to bed. Terry ends up trailing around shutting all the doors, making sure that students can sleep safe from the threat of intruders.

I begin to wonder when the new system kicks in, how all these little jobs will be managed by just one porter, who will be dealing with a  much bigger area and much more students. Surely he will be rushing around so much that there will never be anyone in the porters lodge?

In a statement the University have said: “Porters are not part of the formal student welfare system. There is an extensive welfare network in place to support students and many of the members of that system are resident on campus.”

It’s 1.30am and this “extensive welfare system” is just about to be put to the test.

Terry gets a call from security, who have themselves just been phoned by an anxious parent. The parent has been unable to get hold of her son and she is worried about him because he has been very stressed over the last few days. She wants someone to go and check that he is ok.

So Terry looks at the list of welfare officials that he has been given, and tries to call the Langwith Dean. The number is not recognised. Terry does not find out until the following night that the person listed as Langwith Dean left University some months ago.

“The people they tell us are meant to deal with welfare just don’t exist!” he tells me, outraged.

In the end Terry himself had to go over to the Langwith block with a security officer and the student turned out to be fine. But with such an unreliable welfare system in place Terry says he “dreads to think” what will happen when Vanbrugh and Derwent night porters are no longer there to fill in for them.

In fact, porters sometimes even make the difference between life and death. Terry tells me of one freezing cold winter night when a student dressed in only his underpants was spotted on CCTV stumbling around the college.

Fearing that the student was locked out and would be put at risk if he stayed out in the cold for too long, Terry set out on a frantic search for him. But when he finally found the student amongst the trees between Derwent and Langwith, Terry realised the situation was much worse than he had first thought. The student was brandishing a knife and had cut himself all over his body; blood was pouring from multiple wounds.

Terry immediately recognised the boy, who was known to the porters as a bit of a loner. He was able to call him by his name, which calmed the frenzied student a little. Terry then managed to coax the boy inside and called Security. Terry angrily recalls that it took Security 25 minutes to reach them, during which time he could not take his eyes of the boy for one second, for fear of what he might do to himself.

“That guy would have lost his life if no-one was here,” says Terry. “He even said so himself a few days later.”

Such extreme instances are rare, but Terry says that porters deal with distressed students frequently. Twice last term girls thought they had been followed home by strange men. Terry remembers having to call an ambulance for a student who had cracked his head open whilst leap-frogging over a bollard whilst drunk, and knows one porter who has had to deal with two instances of residents having heart attacks.

Other times students are just upset and need someone to talk to. “We normally will sit them down, make them a cup of coffee and talk to them about it until they feel better,” says Terry. “God knows how they will feel when they get back here, scared or hurt and just see a sign.”

The very same night that I talk to Terry, he hears that at Vanbrugh a female student has collapsed under the influence of alcohol. Luckily there is a porter on hand to deal with the situation. Had this happened just a week later, no-one would have been there.

“How long would it have taken for someone to walk from Wentworth to Vanbrugh to have dealt with this incident, how long would it have been for someone to even have noticed we had a collapsed student if Vanbrugh had been shut?”

Terry is disgusted that the University has axed the 24/7 service, and is fearful about what their next plans might be.

He and other porters that I talk to are all worried that the new service is just the latest step in a scheme to get rid of night portering entirely.

“The people at Heslington Hall, they don’t listen to us and they don’t tell us what is going on. They are not interested in students and they are not interested in porters,” explains Terry.

“They want to turn us into glorified receptionists,” he says gloomily.

Vanbrugh and Derwent porters lodges will only open now from 8.30am-6.30pm Monday to Friday, even though students arguably need the porters the most at unsociable hours when less people are around.

“The bosses have forgotten that this is a university,” sighs Terry. “It’s getting to a stage where students won’t be welcome here at all!”

* Names have been changed to protect the identity of the porter.  (He’s not the guy in  the photo)